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iraq — vietnam on internet time The last few days I've had to give up the keyboard and blog for something less glamorous- the bucket and mop. It started about 3 days ago. I was out on the driveway, struggling with the garden hose and trying to cunningly arrange it to give a maximum trickle of water. My mother was standing at the door, chatting lightly with Umm Maha, from across the street- a stocky, healthy woman in her late forties. Umm Maha had made us 'kilaycha'- a special Eid desert (and the recipe is a bit too complicated to post). Kilaycha are like… not exactly cookies or bars but something like dry, sweet dumplings. They are, basically, a sort of baked dough filled with either nuts, sesame seeds and sugar, dates or just flat and plain, almost like Christmas cookies- but less brittle and sweet. Every house either makes them or buys them for Eid- they are almost as necessary as lentil soup.
I was vaguely listening to the conversation. They were discussing the blackouts and how they were affecting the water flow in some areas (like ours). My mother was mentioning how she was thawing out the freezer because the intermittent electricity was turning everything to mush and Umm Maha suddenly looked awed, "But isn't your freezer clean? Haven't you began with the Eid cleaning?!" I froze as I heard the words and peered around at my mother. She was looking uncomfortable- no we hadn't started with the 'Eid cleaning', but how do you say that to the Martha Stewart of Baghdad? Iraq: Three from one doesn't add up
Iraq is "artificially and fatefully made whole from three distinct ethnic and sectarian communities", says Leslie Gelb in his November 25 New York Time article. Gelb - a former editor and columnist for the Times and president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations - advocates dismembering Iraq into three parts, a Kurdish north, a Sunni center and a Shi'ite south, in what he calls the "Three State Solution". Gelb's proposal is the singularly least democratic suggestion offered to solve the Iraq crisis to date. Moreover, no neighboring country would accept the idea of dividing Iraq. How many small, artificial and unviable countries (like Jordan and the Gulf countries) does the West wish to create in repetition of its post-Ottoman errors? Unlike Yugoslavia, Iraq's different groups have no history of separate existence and they have no history of mutual slaughter. It is true that Iraq was to a certain extent an invention. But all states begin as an imagined idea. A state succeeds if its people believe in it. Iraqis believe in Iraq. If anything, the American occupation is only uniting Iraqis in resentment of the foreigners and non-Muslims who rule them, and increasing their desire to be "free, independent and democratic" as the graffiti says on walls throughout the country. These are the "ambitions" of the Sunnis that Gelb demonizes, just as they are the ambitions of the Shi'ites and Kurds. Iraqis believe in Baghdad, an extremely diverse capital city, where Shi'ites, Sunnis and Kurds live together and even intermarry.
Gelb, like all conscientious observers, is seeking a just solution for the debacle that poor planning (as well as poor justification) caused in Iraq. The solution is to build a strong united Iraq. This can be done by empowering the IGC, by establishing a constitution that protects against dictatorship and the domination of the country by one group, by returning sovereignty to Iraqis as soon as possible, and by avoiding the imposition of Washington based ideologies that are disconnected from the reality of Iraq. Sistani's Fatwa trumped Bremer
Rajiv Chandrasekharan has a wonderful article in the Washington Post on the way Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani's fatwa of June 28 stymied US civil administrator Paul Bremer.
Anyway, Bremer's hope that he could have people like Bahr al-Ulum overrule Sistani would be like hoping a bishop could overrule the Pope. Even 5 bishops could not. And then Bremer's hope that he could put pressure on Sistani to change his mind was also in vain. A jurisprudent is bound by his juridical reasoning as long as he doesn't see new evidence or come up with a new argument. It would be seen as completely corrupt to change a ruling merely on pragmatic grounds, and at the behest of the Americans or of more junior jurists! A Grand Ayatollah gives, rather than taking, marching orders.
How Cleric Trumped U.S. Plan for Iraq The unraveling of the Bush administration's script for political transition in Iraq began with a fatwa. The religious edict, handed down in June by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq's most influential Shiite Muslim cleric, called for general elections to select the drafters of a new constitution. He dismissed U.S. plans to appoint the authors as "fundamentally unacceptable." His pronouncement, underestimated at first by the Bush administration, doomed an elaborate transition plan crafted by U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer that would have kept Iraq under occupation until a constitution was written, according to American and Iraqi officials involved in the process. While Bremer feared that electing a constitutional assembly would take too long and be too disruptive, there was a strong desire on his own handpicked Governing Council to obey Sistani's order.
With no way to get around the fatwa, and with escalating American casualties creating pressure on President Bush for an earlier end to the occupation, Bremer recently dumped his original plan in favor of an arrangement that would bestow sovereignty on a provisional government before a constitution is drafted. Orchards and American Integrity Some Arabs in the Middle East, and their business partners, benefit from oil and natural gas. For the vast remainder, local economies, lives and traditions are intertwined with the earth and the weather, growing grain and fruit, making wine and raising sheep and goats. Americans understand what this means, even if most of us don’t live that life. We mythologize our small farms, and our major political parties stampede to publicly worship that holy ground. Great twentieth century American novels from Steinbeck to Jane Smiley to David Guterson use themes of farming, of trying to create living order from wasted chaos, of old orchards. In the midst of the dust, dirt, frustration, hard times, debt, bad weather, and accidents that is farming in any country, we find something mystical and spiritual, and beloved. This perspective is shared by many Americans here and by American soldiers deployed overseas. When U.S. forces recently bulldozed an orchard in Dhuluaya, Iraq, about fifty miles north of Baghdad, in collective retribution for U.S. inability to find terrorists in the farms, "one American soldier broke down and cried."
Make that two. thanks to Yolanda Flanagan |